I started up Japanese Club this semester, and it's been GREAT! 22 people showed up to the first GIM meeting, and at yesterday's meeting, there were 30 people. This includes several Japanese exchange students. I guess my advertising worked well!
Several members are freshmen who couldn't get into Elementary Japanese 1. I'm going to teach lessons for them each club while everyone else gets into groups. I introduced hiragana last meeting and gave them some charts to study. I hope I can give a clearer introduction to the language and sentence structure next week. I want to teach them vocabulary they can use right away in the club setting. I'm also going to talk to Matsubara-sensei about the possibility of teaching them enough for them to be able to qualify for placement in Elementary Japanese II in the Spring. (Jap I is only offered in Fall.) The rest of the members did exactly what I had hoped they would do- lumped themselves into little groups, I assume to talk about language. The members I gave the lesson to wound up trying to figure it out with each other. There were a LOT of Japanese exchange students! One of the students brought Go, and by the end of the club some people were all ready to start Go Club. Someone even happened to have a blank Charter Form for them to fill out. I just love this time of year, when some people just happen to have extra forms of all sorts on them.
I got us a room with tables, chairs, and a chalkboard on Mondays from 8:30-10:30 pm. This time was best for the most members; however, I realized afterwards that the bi-weekly SA meetings I have to attend to keep my club alive are Mondays from 9:30-11:30. I really should get someone else to go to those meetings, especially since I'm one of the few members who knows this much Japanese (next to the exchange students and an amazingly bi-lingual Hawaiian), and am the only one who's willing to actually take some kind of control of meetings and lessons.
I was afraid my Japanese would die, but it looks like I'm going to be using it alot! I really hope I plan my lessons well. So many people came, I'm so excited!
My American Sign Language professor mentioned that Sign Language is not universal- it's as different from country to country as spoken languages are, and even within American Sign Language, there are different dialects. He commented that most hearing people are not aware of this- they assume that Sign Language is the same across the world.
The typical Hearing person says, "You're just waving your hands at each other, why can't you all wave your hands the same way?"
The typical Deaf person replies, "You're just wagging your tongues at each other. Why can't you all wag your tongues the same way?"
Okay, got computer and internet again. I'm going back to college on the 26th, so after a few days of dealing with packing and unpacking and such, I'll be able to start slipping in more posts.
Just letting you know that because of computer difficulties, I haven't been updating recently and probably won't update much for a few more days. I'm still waiting to reply to some of you!
This journal has reverted to an Unpaid Account. Everything is still here and everything still works and I'll still be updating, but you'll notice that some of the pages look different. For example, when you comment, the page will be white with blue instead of matching my yellow and pink color scheme. Feel free to comment here if you have any questions.
I wanted to write an entry before leaving Japan about my reflections on Japan and anticipations for returning to the States. Six days after returning, I finally get the chance to post.
I really regret not updating more when I was there. Even though I'm no longer in Japan, I will continue updating this journal with entries I've been meaning to write/finish since the very beginning of my stay, so please stick with it! I still need to tell you about Unzen, Okunchi Festival, the Lantern Festival, Tokyo, toilets, and all sorts of random little things that happened while I was there. I have a lot of these noted or partially written, others on my mind but not on my computer, and others have sadly already been forgotten. I had really hoped keeping a journal would prevent that loss.
It's nice to be back home. I'm really enjoying eating all the foods I missed. I think the most important part of the experience of returning is the smells. My house, my room, my grandparents' house, the car, Hannaford, and all the other familiar places all have their own unique smells. There are also the tiny sounds, like the filter of the fish tank in the living room and the sound of the washer and dryer. I realized the other day that the sound of rain-- what I think of as the sound of rain-- is created by each drop of rain hitting a series of leaves on the way down, so you don't hear each raindrop once, but multiple times, perhaps dozens, before it hits the ground. That's why the rain didn't sound as smooth in Nagasaki.
There are things that seem different in comparison to Japan. People aren't as nice. My house's toilet looks smaller and microwave looks bigger. The roads seem safer to drive on and more dnagerous to walk on, especially with the glaring lack of crosswalks. I tried to bike to Hannaford. It's impossible to get to that supermarket without crossing a multi-lane road without any bridges or crosswalks.
Pink lemonade is the same as it's always been!
It feels strange to be able to speak to people without fumbling with a language I only half-know. I no longer have to stop and think painstakingly about each word and sentence before saying something; I can say whatever is on my mind without even thinking first. I expect my conversational skills to plummet accordingly.
All of my fish except a random orange one and the long-lived ugly fish died. Apparently none of the plants were watered since I left. My twisty bamboo was all brown, shriveled, and bent at a 90-degree angle, but the leaves on top were green and alive, so I propped it back up and gave it some water. I think it's looking greener.
I could go on and on about everything, but this post is long enough and I need to work on unpacking. Remember, ljapan will keep posting for a long time as I catch up on backlogged entries about Japan!
Mmmm, this is the week that I have the least time of all the time that I've stayed here, and what do I do?
POST!
I just got smashed, but you know, it's in the most wholesome way possible. I met with my first host family for the last time before returning to the States. They took me to a restaurant in a hotel. I have no idea what the tab was, but it must have been EXPENSIVE. Here's why:
- All you can eat buffet. (granted, not very much- in fact, only two dishes I bothered to eat, including fries & ketchup)
- As far as I could interpret, three free fancy gourmet dishes, plus as many as we wanted to order- Aya and Seiya told me to choose 2 for myself; we wound up getting a total of nine.
- All- you- can- drink alcohol. I believe this is in the States called "Open Bar."
I lost count, but I think I had roughly nine glasses of wine.
Red, white, and sparkling.
Talking about it now, it makes me think of the Fourth of July.
Oh yeah, and I had SMOKED SALMON. You'd think that when you ordered smoked salmon, you'd just get a piddling little appetizer plate with a few measly slices, but no, I got more smoked salmon than I've ever seen in one place. And they got two plates of it, one just for me and another for the two of them, and they gave me the last piece of theirs. This isn't a piece like 1" by 4", this is a piece like 4" by 7". The salmon was covered in mayo, but I scraped it off.
I mean, I guess when you think about it, this stuff is the insides of a strange little sea creature that have been ground up and pulverized. So if I'm having a little trouble placing the exact flavor, it's not surprising. I'm very happy that I did not think about the origins of the stuff in my mouth. I was busy concentrating on Remove Bad Taste and didn't even think to wonder what this stuff was. If I had thought about it, that would've done me in. Just imagine if I had picked up a strange hard spiky thing out of the ocean, cracked it open to find a gooey inside, and put that in my mouth. I would have thought, "No, no, that is NOT meant to be eaten" and vomited everything thoroughly.
You know what? I told them I tried uni, and they asked me, "Ah, did you like it?" like they expected it to be the kind of thing that you either love or you can take or leave! I didn't know the word for "vomit" but I tried to convey "it was almost sent from my stomach" and they still wanted to know if it was delicious! Different strokes for different folks indeed!
Can't these people at least grasp the idea that uni might be hideously repulsive to some people? C'mon, I admitted that YOU might LIKE it!
Oh yeah, I ate fish eyes yesterday. I would totally eat an entire bowl of fish eyes before I would eat one smidgeon of uni, and would you believe that spellchecker let me get away with "smidgeon?" Seriously, after nine glasses of wine (and about three sips of I don't know what it was but it was hard and not good-tasting,) spellchecker's the only thing that's keeping this post understandable. You know, I was thinking about the acceptable standards of compound nouns, spaces, and hyphenation- like, is is "waist band" or "waist-band" or "waistband?" For that matter, will spellchecker insist that you call it "spell checker" or let you get away with "spellchecker" or compromise with "spell-checker?" For your information, Apple Text Edit allows all of the aforementioned combination except "spellchecker's," which a hyphen-"s."
Just choose a prescribed rule of Standard English and make me stick to it, okay?!!
Mm, I gotta post-- heh, spell checker didn't mark "gotta" or "heh"-- I gotta post my Independent Study paper. I did it on the development of the the Japanese Writing System, in BOTH English AND Japanese. I also did some stuff with IPA transcription that I had to write by hand, so there will be blank spaces on the manuscript where I had to print it out and write in the examples by hand.
Last semester's Independent Study project was on Japanese vs. American English's phonetics, and that was IPPAI had to do the transcription by hand.
For that last semester's project, even though I couldn't read Japanese ("But you're taking Japanese" "Yeah right, that doesn't mean I know the vocabulary or KANJI necessary to read a specialized scientific text"), I could read IPA transcription and from that knowledge figure out the notation of the non-IPA transcriptions in Japanese phonetics books. "Well that was easy," said Man, and went on to try to decipher the Japanese books' information about the development of the Japanese writing system, upon which she failed horribly but got an "A" anyway. Yay for Wikipedia.
SPEAKING OF WHICH, did you ever hear of "Wikitravel?"
If you did not just have a combination heart failure and orgasm at that word, I'm not going to bother to take the time explaining what it means. Just spend enough time frustrating yourself with internet searches, and you'll figure it out. Wikitravel: Tokyo. Just so you Wikiphiles know how deep my joy was. I will be well looked-after when I travel to Japan's biggest city.
Speaking of which, I'm going to visit Tokyo te flea market and 100-yen store ni ikimasu. Like, that's four flea markets. And only one 100-yen store, but it's the biggest one in Tokyo. I'm planning to make my home base hotel near the 100-yen store, which is also in the district where cosplayers dress up crazy and hang around so people can take pictures of them. I'll do the first fleamarket the same day I get there, then three more the next day, the last of which will place me in Yokohama, Japan's second biggest city.. .wait... I thought the 100-yen store was somewhere in the first two days... it must be in the first day's flea market district... but if it's not, that means it'll have to come after Yokohama... It just struck me that once I make it to Japan's second largest city, I might want to stay there for more than 5 hours + sleep + find the train get back to Tokyo. But, I want the biggest city's biggest 100-yen store to be one of the first things I do before shopping elsewhere. But then, beyond flea markets and the 100-yen store, the only places I really want to shop are anime/manga stores. SPEAKING OF WHICH, if any of you finds even a MENTION of a plushie of L from Death Note, please tell me, and I will give you a quivering piece of my soul. I can't remember if I posted about it, but I fell in love with L when I flipped thorugh some Japanese manga I couldn't even read, and now that I've found the English scanslations, my love has only increased. The cuteness of an L plushie is something I cannot begin to grok. You know, I have a Kyou Kara Maou Gwendol plushie, and I promptly bought him a cute little kitty to hold. If I get an L plushie, I'm going to find some sort of toy dessert to put in his hands, and leave him by my computer. Ugh, but the way things are going, the possibility of an L plushie are dim. eBay doesn't have any plushies whatsoever for Death Note, or keychains, just posters and I think a couple buttons? That indicates it's not at that level of marketing. Also, it would be hard to do an L plushie, because how can you accurately represent him without him sitting they way he does, and it would be hard to get a plushie to do that. And plushies don't have fingers, so you can't see him using just two fingers. Maybe an action figure? Can stand bent over or crouch. Hands designed to hold little plastic desserts with two fingers. We need Light with changeable eyes.
The other reason I don't think there will ever be an L plushie is because plushies tend to follow anime, but Death Note has been turned into a live-action movie, which, from the previews (which include L crouching in front of his surveillance screens, biting his finger and surrounded by desserts, and there are MACS in the background, and on the screens, Light is doing the trick with the potato chips,) it looks like the movie will cover the manga's storyline, and once you've done that, why bother making an anime? And I already had ideas for music videos to make from the anime- like "Intergalactic" ("I like my sugar with coffee and cream!" and "to change the world, I will plot a scheme") and the song that goes "L is for the way you Look at me"... a REALLY CREEPY one with "I Only Have Eyes for You"... heh... all of you people who haven't read Death Note are like "WTF?"right now... but those who have... YOU CAN SEE IT DON"T YOU?!! Actually, for "Intergalactic," I'd love to do something that compostites the best of all anime characters... for example, after "I like my sugar with coffee and cream," do you know what's next? "Keep it going keep it going keep it going full swing!" That'll be a clip of Golden Boy on his bike. I think at "full swing," I'll have the part where he goes off a cliff while following that biker woman. Not that I have a. the time or b. the thorough knowledge of anime to do it.
But I DO have plushes as Naruto dressed up as a fox, Sasuke dressed up as a wolf, and Itachi dressed up as a weasel! I swear I don't spend much money on frivilous things like this, but what I DO buy, makes me immensely happy. Oh yeah, and I totally got those Naruto plushies out of a grabby machine, and it worked out to about $5 a plushy. Okay, spellchecker marks "plushies" but not "plushy." What is this world coming to?
But, what was I talking about? L! I still haven't finished reading the series because I kinda lost interest after L died, but then, have you ever read a series where your favorite character dies? Death Note keeps mentioning him... brought in a couple characters who were raised the same way he was so you can find out some of his backstory... I guess for a young person like me who hasn't lost a REAL person, reading a series where your favorite character has died is fascinating. I'm flipping though my volume of Death Note (I only bought ONE volume to save both money and space), I see L, and I think, "Oh, L! There he is, eating his desserts and holding things between two fingers!" and it's that much more precious because now he's dead. I guess it's a good introduction to real life when I'll have to make those kinds of associactions with real people I actually knew. Has anyone else figured out how L avoids diabetes and malnutrition? Did anyone else notice that, even though desserts don't tend to include meat anyway, he seems to AVOID meat? He was eating at one point melon that had slices of ham draped over it, and was very deliberately removing the ham, putting it on the side of the plate, and eating just the melon. You know, with his eyes and the way he sits, I really thought at first that L wasn't a human, but some kind of ghoul. But in the English version, it seems he is alas a gifted but human human. Ahh, L, my favorite neurotic supergenius... Has it struck anyone else that if L had trouble choosing between Mello and Near as his successor, and Mello had such severe problem with her temper (I don't CARE if Mello is male! She looks female in ways that even long-haired, slim-faced, feminine-eyed, flower-wearing males from other series don't look! Mello is thoroughly FEMALE in my mind!), don't you think that Near must have a SEVERE defect to makes L think, "You know, maybe this supergenius who can make entire cities out of dice and is always cool as a cucumber would NOT be as good at emotional, tempermental Mello?" Ahh, and once our dear departed L was in the same place as Near and Mello, wondering if he would be the next supergenius detective... speaking of sitting... has it occurred to anyone else that Wammy House might just plain have a shortage of chairs? I want to take the panel where Near and Mello are called in to be told that L's dead, and replace "L's dead" with "We still have a chronic shortage of chairs." Get it, L and Near never sit normally, like maybe they never had chairs growing up. But you know, as I read the manga (at least up to the point I"ve gotten,) Near is starting to show his undesireable side. Not that L was perfect to begin with. I mean, what sane person can come up with a reason to handcuff another person to themselves? I swear, L never does anything too over-the-top, but underneath, he's completely whacked. He'd be taken in right away if he wasn't one of the most trusted people on earth. And NO, I do NOT consider eating nothing but sweets and putting about 20 sugar cubes in his coffee to be nuts. Does anyone else know what he meant when he told Misa that if you use your head, you can eat sweets without getting fat? I want to know how to do that. And L never gets any exercise, just sits at his computers all day, eating desserts! Panda Parade! He's talking and eating those little panda-shaped cookies, Crush Crush Crush! While Light's father is considering resigning his job, L's tying cherry stems in knots with his tongue. He's all like, "You all need to eat a balanced diet, but I, being the smartest person in the world, am so spoiled and privileged that I may eat whatever I like, including nothing but desserts! See me eat jello out of a crystal glass!" He's got things like ham-draped melon that he removes the ham from, and in the movie the desserts look really expensive... although he also eats convenience store junk food like Panda Parade... but still... the way he flaunts it... Like hell Near might have less personality flaws than him. You go, Mello. You take your criminal thugs and emotional instability and chocolate addiction and show the world you're still saner than L.
Did anyone else notice that, shortly before dying (as another fan put it, "he got more and more neurotic towards the end,") L started stacking things up? He stacked about 7 sugar cubes on the handle of his coffee mug and asked if it could be considered a "feat." Then, we see Near stacking up dice to form entire cities. Maybe L was thinking about his successor?
Oh yeah, sorry if there were any spoilers for those of you who haven't read/finished Death Note. But yes, L dies, through the Death Note, although we never learn his real name, although I have a theory that, at least for L's Wammy House name, L stands for Light. That's why, whenever speaking to/about Light, he always specifies YAGAMI Light. Yeye, notice what you get when you list L, Mello, Near? L, M, N. Like the alphabet. Surely a coincidence, especially with the system they use for creating L's successor. But still... OMG, if the next Wammy House prodigy is named Osen, I'll just die.
But anyway, what did this post begin with in the first place? Right! I went out with my first host family and drank around 9 glasses of wine! Apparently, I am a rambling drunk. Oh yeah, my dad called me on around my 7th glass, I'm just like "Hello? Okay, *responds like a sober person.*" But you know, I think this post is fairly coherent, or at least grammatically and... um... spellatically correct, isn't it? I must have a high tolerance for alcohol.
My sincerest apologies to those of you who haven't read Death Note. Or seen the movie. Does anyone else HATE L's hair in the movie?? It's so obviously a wig, and it doesn't even look like his hair in the manga!! I mean, it would be understandable if it looked fake but still managed to approximate the hair in the manga, but no, this wig just looks bad. And the shirt... dude... just run to the second hand shop and get him a plain white shirt... what's this thing you've made for him that looks like it's made out of cheap felt... he looks like a failed cosplayer... At least they made his compuers Mac G4s... XD I've heard that the American commercial translations erased the words like "iMac" from his computers, probably for copyright reasons. Bah! The world's supergenius detective uses Macs, yo! Don't try to cover up the truth!
--------- edit on 08/08/06: The "Death Note" anime series will begin to air in October.
I seriously don't have time to do updates now- I'd been planning on allotting a little time to talk about my feelings and anticipations on returning to the states, and that was going to be my last post before leaving Japan.
But I have to post now, because I just ate THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I HAVE EVER TASTED.
It's "uni," or "sea urchin."
Now, regarding strange seafoods, I am wary but willing to experiment. Recall that the only thing I've ever spit out (before today) was raw sea cucumber intestine.
So, my host family had this expensive uni which I was told cost $5 for a tablespoon's worth. I've heard from other people that uni is expensive, and Eiko says she loves uni and used to eat it raw straight from the sea.
Okay, I'll try uni. I was wary of it, and it wasn't until halfway through the meal that I felt my stomach was stable enough to take it. (Not queasy from hunger and not nauseous from being overstuffed.) As I examined the little red pile, my host mother said something along the lines of, "It's expensive, but it's fine if you can't eat it."
And do you know what I said? Do you know the words that came out of my mouth, lightly, with adventerous optimism, as I put the uni into it?
"Tabete miyou!" ("Let's try it and see!")
I mean, how bad can it possibly be?
I ALMOST VOMITED.
It was DISGUSTING! Not to sound ignorant about another culture's cuisine, but the most accurate way I can describe this is if a person ate nail clippings with sour meat, vomited it up, ate the vomit and then vomited that up, along with bile.
Now, the taste of vomit itself is disgusting but certainly something that I've learned to tolerate in my mouth for a short period of time. But THIS was UNBEARABLE. It had this odd flavor to it that you don't find in vomit; this flavor is even more disgusting; I've run into it before- I'm trying to remember when- and been like "ugh, this taste is bad, good thing it's weak." I think maybe when scraping plaque off my teeth or the taste of freshly filed nails? Was it a cement filling? It wasn't food. And, uni is strong... like condensed vomit plus that flavoring... I only put a tiny bit smaller than a pencil eraser in my mouth, and the taste STAYED. My host mother saw my expression and told me to eat it with rice, so I shoved some rice into my mouth, which resulted in my mouth becoming filled with uni-flavored rice.
I was trying to figure out how to swallow it without throwing up-- and deciding that was impossible and trying to figure out how to not puke period-- when my host mother started getting me some napkins, said something about "haite ii" ("It's fine if it's in there"? Her manner suggested she was urging me to spit it out, but I can only interpret that phrase as meaning it's fine to have something inside my mouth). Yeah, I spit it out into my hand and then put it in the napkin.
The flavor was still there and I was still trying not to puke at the dinner table. I thought a nice wholesome carrot would erase the flavor, but that wound up becoming uni-tainted and I had to swallow it. I tried drinking tea, but that was like swallowing uni juice. But by then the taste was starting to fade, and drinking things like water and tea helps settle my stomach. My host mother kept asking, "Are you okay?" and all I could do was nod a little-- if I had even taken the glass away from my mouth, I might've thrown up. Then I got some OJ from the fridge and that took care of it.
I mean, I guess when you think about it, this stuff is the insides of a strange little sea creature that have been ground up and pulverized. So if I'm having a little trouble placing the exact flavor, it's not surprising. I'm very happy that I did not think about the origins of the stuff in my mouth. I was busy concentrating on Remove Bad Taste and didn't even think to wonder what this stuff was. If I had thought about it, that would've done me in. Just imagine if I had picked up a strange hard spiky thing out of the ocean, cracked it open to find a gooey inside, and put that in my mouth. I would have thought, "No, no, that is NOT meant to be eaten" and vomited everything thoroughly.
As I looked at my host mother through tear-filled eyes, she said to me, "I love uni."
I said, in my all-accepting way, "Different strokes for different folks..." [english] I explained in Japanese it meant that different people love different things.
Strangely, my reaction is not "How can you possibly LIKE that?!!" I can actually nod and say, "Ah, yes, I can see how some people would love this stuff."
I was just sitting here updating my journal, and the doorbell started to ring. Since I:m home alone, I didn:t answer it, because both my host mother and I think it would be too weird for some foreigner who can:t speak Japanese well to answer the door to some stranger who:s looking for my host mom.
I didn:t answer it, and it rang agian, and then rang a whole bunch of times in rapid succession so I ran to answer it.
It was someone I apparently knew! She came over just to give me a wish branch for Star Festival! I felt bad about not answering right away, but I think she understood.
The Star Festival is on 7/7. It:s the one night of the year when Vega and Altair cross the heavens to be together. In the days leading up to this event, people put up bamboo branches, often to the effect of an entire tree, decorated with paper and "tanzaku." Tanzaku are long, colored strips of paper on which you write your wish.
I wrote, "みんあはおなじ外語が話せますように": "I wish everyone could speak the same foreign language."
I met some friends today. We had lunch at a nice little multi-cultural house that had a different ethnic meal cooked by a foreign student each day. Today was Jamaican chicken curry rice and banana bread.
It:s really interesting to meet with these people. They:re an English conversation group, and they always invite English-speaking friends from Europe, Canada, USA, etc. Today, that 190cm girl from... Germany?... was there. Everyone speaks in English, including the Japanese people who don:t know it well. Oh yeah, and most of Hisako:s friends are as scatterbrained as she is, which means a scatterbrained as I am, which means give us wide clearance wherever we go.
On a different subject, I met my friend at Nagasaki Eki Mae, which is right smack in front of Amu Shopping Plaza. I got there early and wandered around a bit. There were some people in kimonos giving handouts that I avoided like the plague, because the last thing I need is some useless paper to carry around.
I went back home from Eki Mae too, and went into Amu to use the bathroom. Again, I used advanced ninja skills to avoid the people with the handouts that were swarming the central plaza.
Then, when I was on the densha on the way home, I saw what some of the passengers were holding and realized what those people were handing out.
I got off the densha and spent and extra dollar and 20 minutes to go back to Amu and get one.
In Japanese class, we did an exercise where we each read a sentence about a man's relationship problems and then gave him advice.
It's like the authors of the book WANTED trouble.
The poor little man in my hands had forgotten to give his wife anything on their anniversary. First I said he should kill himself. (In Japanese.) But, since that sentence was far too simple, I said, "He should buy some flowers that bloom a little later. He should say to his wife, 'These are the most beautiful flowers, but they hadn't yet bloomed on our anniversary, and I could only give you the most beautfiul flowers to match your beautiful face."
You'd think I'd have topped it. But I didn't. David's man wanted to know how he could impress a girl he liked. David's answer:
"Go to her house wearing an astronaut helmet and boots."
The class literally spent the next 3-5 minutes trying to explain this joke to the teacher.
Got up at 7:30 and walked to college for my 9:00 class, was a few minutes late... I really need to stop thinking of the walk as "30 minutes;" it's really more like 40.
My phone rang when I was in the bathroom at college, and I didn't answer because 1. I was in the bathroom and 2. who the heck calls at 9 am?!!!
I forgot about the call and was doing research on Tokyo and my kanji paper when it rang again, and it was Akira.
Akira and Shizuka are a couple that I met very randomly. When waiting for the crosswalk signal to go to the densha to go to an electronics store, this couple started talking to me, because strangers tend to talk to foreigners.
The crosswalk changed, and I went to the densha stop in the middle of the road and they took too long to say "bye" and the crosswalk turned red before they could make it to the other side of the road. So, they decided, rather than wait for it to change again, they'd go to the electronics store with me.
We've met several times since. We ate at a conveyor belt sushi place, got ice cream, played pool... and it's always on random short notice, which is what was so cool about them in the first place.
Akira wanted to know if I could meet and hang out the same day, so I went ahead and agreed to meet him at 4:30.
I left early to talk to a travel agent, who happened to be in the same building we agreed to meet at, about going to Tokyo. I want to spend a few days there before coming home, and need to buy a ticket and arrange for my luggage. But, she was on break, so I wandered around the store instead.
Met Akira at 4:30, and we went to "JJ Club." JJ Club is the yellow building on the left. The red sign to the right says "ALCOHOL." You can also observe the chaotic traffic, including a beautiful shot of a car making a right-hand turn over a crosswalk while the WALK sign is green.
I have no idea how the pricing works, but you get a $3 membership card and then you can have free access to the building's facilities- pool; ping pong; some games where you can kick soccer balls, hit golf balls and throw baseballs; air hockey; manga; karaoke; internet; and a bunch of arcade games, some of which are "free play" and a few you need to give coins to. They also have fishing- there's a pool of live koi, and you have a little fishing rod and some bait and a bucket. All I can think is, "those poor fish... either they're really abused from being caught all the time, or they've gotten smart enough to not get caught." I caught four fish and Akira caught one.
Afterwards, I had to pay $6.30... I have no idea how they work out the charges... still, it's a pretty good deal for all you get to do.
I had to take two buses to get home. Just when I was thinking, "I'll need to try to spend a little time here," it's very inconvenient to get to.
I got home about 7, and my host mom was a little late. She brought a pre-made dinner, an assembly of meat and noodles and salad and stuff. It was pretty good.
Then a little studying and shower and reading and sleep!
The internet is back up at my college, so now I can connect using my own computer, which means it's easier for me to post and research and e-mail and now I can chat again.
1. Got a package from my parents which, to my extreme delight, contained beef jerky, and furthermore contained 4 sugar maple leaves and some of my mom:s fudge!!!!! I had been trying to stretch that little package of jerky they sent me last month to last the whole time, and now I have two more JUMBO pouches! That:s 6 grams of beef! And the maple leaves... mmmmmm... The fudge... tastes kinda funny... but it:s still GOOOOOOOOD! And everything was hidden among about 8 pieces of bubble wrap, which truly made unpacking an adventure!!!!!
2. The seller who never delivered the camera I bought last month never responded when I filed a claim with Paypal, so it was decided in my favor adn Paypal has refunded the money I lost. This incident demonstrates how eBay is both dangerous and safe: I was ripped off by a seller, but wound up getting my money back. Overall, eBay is definitely worth the risk.
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sick
amused
